Repairing A 100 Year Old Miniature "Busy B" Electric Fan....

Ladies and gentlemen, welcome back to Amateur Repair Time. Today we are going to work on this huge Busy B fan. Look how big this thing is. I hope you didn't get the Alfred Hitchcock vertigo thing going on. Let's see if I've got a tape measure here. I might even be able to do it in millimeter for you millimeter people overseas. Let's see, does this have a ruler on it? Here we go. This is good old US of A inches here. This sucker is just about eight inches tall. About eight inches tall and about, I'm not that good at measuring am I? Six and three quarters inches wide I would guesstimate. Now for you people that insist on using millimeters, this sucker is about maybe 19 centimeters tall. Something like that. That's good enough. Can't do too much more centimeters or I'll get confused. It's a tiny one. I saw this at a thrift store. Here's my hand. I don't have particularly huge hands, but I'd say they're above average. I'm going to get banned again. It's about the size of my hand. Look at this thing. Man, that's cool. I saw this at an antique mall and it was $22. Now that's a little it's not bad, but that one over there I paid $5 for. A bigger one is worth a little bit, but $22 is hell. You can spend that on a taco. It's not that bad. I really liked it because it's so small. I just thought it was so cool. It is called a Busy Bee. What a great name. Now this sucker is old. I was thinking looking at it too that maybe it had been spray painted, but I don't think it has because the shaft hasn't been spray painted. The screw hasn't been spray painted and the oiling thing or whatever that is, that screw there hasn't been spray painted. That hasn't been spray painted. I think it's all original. Well, I shouldn't say all original. I think a lot of it is original. Here's the sticker. I can't tell if it's been painted up to it. Maybe it was taped off at some point or something. I think it's about a hundred years old. Kelman Corporation, New Haven, Connecticut. Let's look at the back. I don't think it's been painted. I think that's the original finish in remarkable shape. Now, I don't know about the base. I don't know. It looks pretty good, doesn't it? Yeah, look at the inside with a patent label. I think that's just the original finish in pretty good shape. I've seen a lot of other people's fans that look like that, and they've, oh, it's all original, and I always thought, oh, come on, come on, but I think it might be. I think it may have just had a fairly good coating of paint on it that's lasted a hundred years. So, $22, I thought it was worth that. The blade spins freely. It's got a little bit of resistance to it, which is probably about right, isn't it? It doesn't hit the guard. Who knows how bent up the guard is. See, this all looks straight. So, those three look pretty straight. This one, I think, bent in just a little bit. I might have to mess with that a little bit, but the fan doesn't look like it's hitting anything. It's got plenty of room. You know, you can kind of tell if it's with the blade straight by just spinning it. So, like, if you see where that back of the blade goes past this, how much room is there? If you just hold steady, that one's farther back. That one's about the same. That one's farther forward. So, that one probably needs to go back a little bit, and this one's going to need to come forward a little bit. And, you know, you can do just a kind of quick balance like that. It's obviously not perfect, but, you know. And the blade itself, I think, you know, it isn't brass or anything. It's just a tin blade that was painted black originally, and it's still in pretty good shape. So, the cord has been cut. You can see it way up in there. You can barely see it. See it up in there? The two little, you can see the ends of the wires. See it right there? So, we need to get into this sucker and put a new cord on it. While we're at it, we'll oil it, and then we'll see if she'll get busy again. I imagine when it runs, it goes... Okay, so there's a wing nut on the side. I took off. The base just easily came loose once the screw came out. Literally, you could just loosen it with your hand. And then, there were two screws that held this little bracket on the bottom of the fan that came out very easily with a screwdriver. And then, there were two little nuts on the back of the motor housing. Took those loose, and the motor housing just slid right apart. So, I don't know if somebody's been in here before or not, but it came right apart. So, here is the paint on the inside. Is that copper? Is that that color because it's copper? I mean, it kind of feels like copper. Yeah, I think that's original paint, right? Wouldn't you agree? I'm going to research if I should wax it to clean it. Two little screws, I mean nuts. And here's the fan. It's not that heavy, so I set it down on its guard. It's not bending it or anything. So, what have we here? Is that a set screw that holds the blade in? I guess so. No? That wouldn't work, would it? Because the blade needs to spin. It does look like a set screw. That's a weird one, though. I would guess that's like a... Yeah, I'm trying to figure out how to oil it. Okay, I think maybe I should take the guard off next so we don't screw that all up. Okay, so the blade had a set screw on the side of it to hold it on. And then the guard, if you notice, it has three attachment points, bosses, whatever you want to call it. It had two screws holding two of them in, and then the top one was held on by a nut and a washer, which were on that stud, which is longer than that stud. This stud just had a regular nut on it, and that seems like this is going to come right off. Is that copper again? Yeah, it's got the same looking thing up there. I mean, I'm just guessing it's copper. Maybe not. It may be that they made a... There was a way to do that with metal. Is it anodized? There was a way that they made a coating on metal that kind of looked that way, so maybe it's that instead. So here is the motor assembly with the two cut power wires. I don't like that they were part of the motor. It's not separately done, so I'm going to have to very carefully splice into that somehow. I don't even know if there's going to be enough room for a wire nut. I'll have to figure that out. But there's a string wrapped around. This is all very well done, which you would expect for something from this era. Everything was made pretty nice. I don't get why the screws are like that. I don't completely get that. I don't get what's going on there. So that is spinning, so whatever that is, it's not touching the shaft, and it's solid, so you can't get oil down through it. I don't know what the world's going on there. I mean, I would assume that that's where the oil goes. Why is that in there like that? Okay, so I'm going to take one of them loose and just see what it looks like inside. Aha! So this has a little piece of felt in it. It's a little oil wick. So you fill that up with oil, soak it with oil, and then put it back, and that permanently, for quite a while, will lubricate the shaft. Well, that's cool. Okay, well, now I know what it is. But I'm going to take this out, actually, because I want to clean off the rotor. I've had problems in motors in crane machines before, where if that rotor is dirty, you run into problems where it doesn't do its thing. So I kind of want to just very lightly clean that, so that I can get it nice and shiny, and then put it back in. So that's what I'm going to do. Okay, so this was the order that it was in. If you find yourself working on one of these, the back has a washer, a fiber washer, a felt spacer, probably good for more oil, a fiber washer, and then the rotor. The front had none of that. Not one washer on it, which, you know, doesn't seem right. Seems like it would have one, but it doesn't. It doesn't have any. So that's how we're going to put it back. And here's a close-up of the motor, the stator. It's just a piece of beauty, really. I mean, it's beautiful. Look at the twine holding it together. Look at that. So this, I'm not going to do anything to, but I'm going to clean this up just a little bit, and then we're going to oil, oil, oil, and put it back together. So I'm cleaning these up, which is essentially the bearings, and one of them, the rear one, says P1940. So I thought, well, that's, it was made in 1940, maybe. I thought it looked a little older than that. And then I found this one. This is the front one, and it says P1939. So I think it's just the part number, actually. It has nothing to do with the year. All right, so I got that back together, and you can see how the oilers are. The one on the front goes down into, we're looking at upside down, of course, goes down into the right, and the one on the back goes down into the right. So if you look at the two cans, the hole for the wire is at the bottom. So down into the right is the front, because you can see where the three mounts are for the guard. And then on the back, the back is also down into the right, because you can see where the hole is for the guard. But once it's on, this one is like that, and this one is like that. So they actually look funny, but it's because they're reversed. So I think that's right. So I test checked the back, and there's just hardly any room in there. So I think my only shot, really, at the repairing the wiring, is I'm just going to have to splice it together, and put some tape on it. Solder it together, put tape on it. Which is essentially what they're doing in there too, with this. You know, like where it's soldered together in there, and then they've got tape over it. I just, I think that's all I've got room for in there. I can't put like a big twist nut on it, and then tape that. There's just not enough room. I guess if you're away from the motor, you know, we just don't, there's not a lot in there. It's pretty tight. So I'm just going to trim the wires back a little bit. I'm going to, I'm going to leave it small too. Just a little tiny bit of wire sticking out. Then I'm going to lay the other wire right next to it, the new wire, and I'm going to tape it. And then once we put all this on, all that's going to stay together for a long time. All right, so she cleaned up pretty good. The splice was right as it goes into the head. I think we're going to be all right. So I'm going to test it. We're just going to go live and see if we blow every fuse in the shack here. Now you can't leave it on, you can't leave it on long without the fan, because without the blade, because that's kind of, that's part of what cools the engine, the motor. All right, so we're just going to give it a second, see if it breaks apart and kills me. If it does, it's been good knowing y'all, and I don't know how this got up loaded. One of my brothers must have done it. Ain't she sweet. Oh, that's going to be nice. Okay, so I cleaned up the base and the head with, I used some oil to clean it, and I used some wax after that just to also clean it, and then buffed it a little bit. Don't want to go too much though, you know, you want it to look old, but it really made it look pretty good. The guard is a little ugly, but I think I'm going to leave it like that. I am going to try to straighten out what I think is bent. I should be able to tell a little better with it off, and then I'm going to try to straighten the fan out a little bit. It's pretty straight though. I think after we made our little adjustments that we did earlier, I mean, that's nice and flat. It's pretty flat. I think that's pretty good. You know, you got the other way too, or how far back does it go? You know, one good way to tell is to put it on the fan. So, because I'm going to clean this a little bit, and then we'll try bolting it on next, and seeing how that looks. All right folks, we're going to try it with the blade on. That's the dangerous part, you know. Oh boy. I hope we're all right. All right, let's watch the spin down. Not that long, only three or four seconds. I think it'd be longer. Yeah, it seems to be working good. All right, so I'm going to clean up the guard and pop it back on. So, this little badge on the front of these, sometimes that's why they make noise whenever they, they'll make like a little rattle, because this will be loose. This one was a little bit loose, so I laid it down, and it's got two little clamps that hold it on. I just tap them a little bit, tighten it up just a little bit. And then the, the front, you know, it looks like that, has this really cool design. And so, some of those, about three of those were pushed in, so I carefully bent them back flat so that they're not pushed in, but they still have the nice little curved look. Easy as that. All right, so with the guard on, we can judge how even the blades are a little better. So, like, if we watch it go by that guard up there, let's say when we see it get right here. This is not the best way to do this, but it's a way you can do this. It would be better if I used a tripod, I'm sure. There you go, you get the idea. They're all passing at about the same spot on the guard. And then if you look at the front of the blades, that's the best way to do it. Maybe look at that. They're a little off, but fairly similar. So, that's what she looks like cleaned up a little bit, and with a cord, and oiled. Now, let's go research it. All right, so I did a little research on them, and they were made in 19, in the 1920s, almost all of them, in New Haven, Connecticut. And, you know, it was made by Gilbert. It says Kelmer, Kelment, I wanted to do Kelmer, Kelment, which was Gilbert. I wonder if it's the same Gilbert that made clocks. You know, most of the clocks were made in Connecticut. I'll look that up in a second. But anyway, this is a nice 12-inch one with a chrome blade, and this one is an oscillator, and it has a speed switch on it. So, this was kind of like the Mac Daddy. Then, I think this is probably the same one, and just in really rough shape. Also, this one doesn't oscillate. So, you know, it's kind of the same old thing. They all, they made several different versions. This is a really nice version of the one that we've got. This is a six-inch blade. Same thing we've got. Very nice. This is the same one. Slightly different tag inside of it. They put a switch on the power cord. This says rare small vintage six-inch fan, but that's not a six-inch fan. So, you know, I don't know if you're into old fans, but basically, the better old fans had brass blades. So, people like the brass blades. They just look really cool. So, this is an oscillator. This is not a six-inch fan. This is a much bigger one. I thought I saw. Yeah, look. So, yeah, that's a nine-inch fan. You know, it's a nine-inch blade, and it's like 14 inches tall or something like that. So, anyway, that's that. So, let me look and see if Gilbert was the same one that made the clocks. Now, it's a different company. So, A.C. Gilbert made Kelment fans, and William L. Gilbert was the Gilbert that made the clocks. The clocks predated the fans, obviously, because they predated the electricity. William L. Gilbert made some really cool radios, I'm not radios, clocks back in the 1800s. But they were nothing really special. They were kind of knockoffs of other brands and stuff like that. I have a personal soft spot for them, but it's a completely different company. This is A.C. Gilbert. So, they made things like erector sets and things like that. And it says, fans were branded as Polar Club. Okay, let's read the whole thing. In addition to erector, A.C. Gilbert was, of course, responsible for many other products as well. One category that has been slighted are the Polar Club fans. There's a dearth of information about these fans and other Gilbert appliances. Fans were branded as Polar Club, Gilbert, or Busy B. Busy B fans were manufactured in the Gilbert factory, but were products of Kelment Corporation, a captive company of A.C. Gilbert in the 1920s. I suspect that Polar Club fans were sold under other brand names as well. My feeling is that the small early fans with the P56 motor and nominal six-inch diameter blades are not very scarce. Two-bladed fans are less common than four-bladed ones, and counterclockwise rotation is less common. So, ours is clockwise and it is six-inch four-blade. So, this is A.D. Goolsby saying this in a newsletter in 1999. Jay Smith and I have discussed the use of erector motors in the construction of these fans and in models produced for sale at Sears. At first glance, it appears that some of the earliest fans used P56 motors that were identical to those found in erector sets. However, comparing a P56G erector motor to a motor in one of my fans, I have observed several interesting differences. Aside from the mounting and shaft exposure at one end only, for instance, the fan housing is a quarter inch to three-eighths inch longer. The cylindrical portions of the fan motor are longer than those of a P56G, but the tapered portion of the blade end is shorter. Furthermore, the extensions on the ends for lubrication are cylindrical instead of tapered. These differences are not observed between P56Gs and the P56 motors on the earliest six-inch breezes. It may be that later fans needed a heavier-duty housing compared to the motors intended for toy applications. So, that's very interesting. So, they made erector toy sets and then they made a similar motor to just run a fan on. So, that's the story. It does kind of sound like a bee. Man, that's a beautiful fan. I mean, that's just a cool fan. 100 years old, still works just fine and looks great. This has a really nice look to it. Just a simple little design. It was probably about the cheapest thing you could get back then. Decent amount of air too. Not too loud, but it does have a little buzz to it. Let's see if the motor is warming up. No, the case feels fine. Yeah, very cool. I'll have to try to find one of the, that bigger one. I guess it looked like maybe there were three sizes, a nine and a 12. So, maybe a six, a nine, and a 12. It'd be cool to find an old advertisement for it. It might make it look a little better to repaint this black, but leave the middle copper or whatever that is. I'm just going to leave it how it is. I think it looks pretty good. You know, if it's a little bit worn, it's 100 years old, it's supposed to be a little worn. So, I like it. There you go, folks. I hope you enjoyed it. I've got several other fans too, but this one was just a really cool one that I thought I could probably fix pretty quick. So, luckily it cooperated. So, leave your comments below. Have you ever seen a busy bee pen? And I will see you on the next video.